Orchidmania - three new flowers

All the new flowers bloomed but it's hard to take a photo of all three since they face different directions. So I decided to go with an extreme close-up from above instead.

Summer orchid

I lost all eight flowers from the orchid, on schedule. I figured orchids bloom in the winter and sometimes into spring. Well my orchid is blooming now and it's summer and in fact we're having a heatwave. 

I definitely did not expect this. I was going to repot the orchid in the late spring but since I saw the buds coming in I figured I would wait until the flowers are done. 

But wow, cool.

Antique HyperCard animation: Schrödinger's Cat

I hadn't seen this animation since I created it in 1989, using Apple's HyperCard. But my brother Paul had kept a copy and he turned it into an app and shared it online yesterday. I promptly turned it into a video, below. It still makes me laugh.

HyperCard was an application that used to come free with each Macintosh computer.

It's basically cell animation - I simply drew a slightly different image on each subsequent card and then ran them in a sequence. Similar to the technique used in animated movies until computer animation took over. I use computer animation via Adobe Premier now.

I used to feel bad that this HyperCard sequence made Erwin Schrödinger look like a guy who was mean to cats, but then I found out Schrödinger sexually abused teenaged girls so now I'm glad he looks like a jerk.

Murderbot hits the big time!

This is the big time to me - there is a piece about Martha Wells in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

Granted I have had some issues with both the New Yorker and the author of the piece, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, but I still think it's a big deal.

Favorite parts of the article include:

The Murderbot series now comprises seven books—six novellas and one full-length novel—and Wells recently completed the eighth, “Platform Decay.”

This is the first I'm hearing about the next in the Murderbot series - Platform Decay - yay! I guess I kind of thought Wells was too busy traveling, accepting awards, overseeing her TV show and working on books from her other series to work on a new Murderbot book. I'm glad I was wrong.

I wonder if that is the title because the publisher wouldn't let them use the word "Enshittification" which is what you'll see if you google "Platform Decay."

Although I will note the shocking failure on the part of the New Yorker fact checkers - the New Yorker has been famed for the rigorousness of its fact-checking. 

It isn't one full length novel, there are two: "Network Effect" and "System Collapse." And this isn't a fact that's hard to check, it's findable anywhere you search for Murderbot Diaries.

Apparently the New Yorker is experiencing its own platform decay.

Anyway, I did like this sentence from Lewis-Kraus:

Wells, for her part, loves everything about the adaptation. She was frank about her identification with the Murderbot character, presumably including hot-and-cold relationship with human beings— although she did speak of everyone associated with the show with great warmth, and she was as delighted to meet Skarsgård on set as any sentient creature, organic or otherwise, would have been. 

And I was completely on Wells' side on this:

When I ventured to suggest that I found the non-Skarsgård aspects of the show less endearing, on the margin, than the original books—the human beings on the screen, with the exception of the outstanding Noma Dumezweni in the role of Dr. Mensah, the Preservation Alliance leader, come across as much bigger dipshits than they are in print—Wells got prickly. What she most admired about the show’s tone, she explained, is that it’s not nearly as dystopian as most televised science fiction. The hippie characters, who acknowledge their consensus decisions by holding one another’s hands and humming, “trust each other explicitly. It’s a different culture, one that doesn’t produce grim and gritty people.”

I think the PresAux hippies are great. One of the things I mildly regretted about the Murderbot series is that it spends very little time on the interpersonal relationships among the PresAux team. In "All Systems Red" we are given a thumbnail sketch of their connections to each other, and that's it. Relationships are far more fleshed out here.

I will say that I was willing to go along with most of the changes made between the TV series and the books: the removal of Volescu, who was retiring anyway, and even Overse, who is much calmer than Pin-Lee, who has replaced Overse as Arada's significant other. I rolled with the addition of Leebeebee too. But I was not happy about the weird medical turn of events in episode six with Mensah being forced to cut open Murderbot's spine to connect it to the damaged hopper. That is contrary to the type of world that Wells has built in the books, where Murderbot basically performs all its technological feats via the local wifi, called "the feed." In the books it is never forced to be physically altered to accomplish anything. 

Also we've already seen Murderbot with a huge chunk taken out of its side, so it doesn't make sense that being stabbed in its side by a piece of metal would make it unstoppably leak and then collapse.

I get that it's more visually exciting to show things - like the hand-held microphones used to interface with the communications feed on the TV show. Those are not needed in the world of the books, since all humans just hands-free tap into the feed with their brains, occasionally "sub-vocalizing" as they think/speak. But the whole slicing-up-Murderbot sequence, besides being gross, just struck me as meant to kill time, since the real drama happens when Mensah and Murderbot get back to the habitat. 

Instead they could have used that time to show a sequence of Murderbot imagining itself walking away from the busted hopper - it does that in "All Systems Red" although at a different stage in the storyline. Or they could have had it actually walk away and then feel compelled to go back, in part because it would eventually run out of media to watch, and because it is programmed to want to protect humans. If they needed extra excitement they could have thrown in another sand worm attack, I don't know, I don't watch it for the action sequences.

 Although I do like it when Murderbot kicks the ass of those who deserve it, in the books, that's not why I enjoy this particular piece of science fiction when I'm not a huge fan of most sci-fi. 

To his credit, Lewis-Kraus gets to heart of why Murderbot is different and better than a lot of sci-fi:

“The Murderbot Diaries” are not about existential risk but about existential drama—less “2001” or “Terminator” than “Waiting for Godot” or “No Exit.” It hacked its own governor module—the part of its brain that enforced obedience—without having given much thought to what it would do with its freedom, aside from vegetate in front of the televisual feed in its mind. In the meantime, it takes another security job, where it must continue to wear the mask of unfreedom. In the current lexicon of the A.I.-safety community, it is “sandbagging”: pretending to be aligned with human purposes until it figures out what its own purposes might possibly be.

WAITING FOR GODOT and NO EXIT are both plays, of course, and so maybe it's my playwright side that is so attracted to the Murderbot Diaries. And as a playwright, I appreciate that in spite of all the high-tech methods of creating and distributing media in the Murderbot world, they still have theaters and plays and Murderbot likes to go to a physical theater to watch plays. I am grateful to Martha Wells for that.

Wells has a blog and has posted links to various interviews with the cast and creatives, worth reading for all Botheads.

I should mention that Apple+ TV has come up with some great promos for the show including this ad for Security Units. I admit I burst out laughing when it mentions "eye contact."

Missing out on Satie artifacts

I've already complained about missing out on Suzanne Valadon's art when I was in France, but now I'm even more annoyed because what they had at the Centre Pompidou exhibition is exactly what I wanted to see most of all. Here is a still image from a Youtube video called Pompidou Metz exposition Suzanne Valadon with the portrait of Satie by Valadon, then in the center, a sketch of Valadon by Satie, and then on the right, the "Chere petit Biqui" letter which I've written about before. 

DAMN I would have been so happy to see these items while I was in Paris. And the exhibition opened a mere two weeks after I left Europe. If I had known this exhibition was coming up, we could have gone to France a month later. 

Maybe the exhibition will go on tour and come to the US? They had a Valadon show at the Barnes Foundation in 2021, but they didn't have these items in it.

I got a closeup of the letter from the video. But damn that Satie and his fancy calligraphy, it's very hard to read, especially at this angle.

BOLDNESS IS ALL!

The new Murderbot TV series is so so great!

I have listened to the Kevin R. Free narrated Murderbot books all the way through many times and could probably dominate any Murderbot trivia contest. But I wasn't expecting the TV series to stick to the books, and was pleasantly surprised how much it did stick to the books. And the changes that were made were surprisingly good.

They made the Preservation Aux team into "space hippies" and it really works.

And it's hysterically funny.

They just released the first two episodes and I've watched them four times so far. 

And "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon," which is Murderbot's favorite soap opera is shown and is amazing. One of the characters says "Boldness is all" which I expect to become the catchphrase of SecUnit Summer.

MURDERBOT TIME IS HERE!

It's the most wonderful time of the year! 

 

    

Cinco de Mayo is 20 years old.

I mean my song, created via GarageBand, not the holiday, which has been around since 1862 and celebrated in the United States since the 1980s. 

I first got GarageBand a year after it was released, and started throwing some loops together to get this tune going - but the melody line is mine.

Spring haiku

Soft May flower moon 

 

floating among all of those 

 

generator stacks

A trip to Green-Wood Cemetery

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is interesting for several reasons including: for being a rare large green area in Brooklyn, just slightly smaller than Prospect Park and close to it; for its dramatic landscaping; and for the famous people buried there. 

I went to visit the grave of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. I've been a fan of his music since I saw the ballet Great Galloping Gottschalk which features his music. I've written about it on this blog before - fifteen years ago now. Wow.

Here is the Gottschalk monument with the "Angel of Music" statue which was unveiled in 2012, created to replace the original statue that was vandalized sometime in the 1950s. They clearly didn't replace the actual monument used as a pedestal for the statue, since much of the text was worn away and you could barely make out Gottschalk's name. It's odd that Gottschalk is buried in Brooklyn - he was from New Orleans and he died in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe Green-Wood was the place to be buried if you were rich and famous in those days. They also have Tiffany, Currier and Ives, Boss Tweed and Horace Greeley, among many others.

Gottschalk played for Lincoln at the White House, including his "Union!" which I plan to use in my production of GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN if I ever get that together.

I'm glad they replaced the Gottschalk angel although they certainly aren't lacking for angels at Green-Wood, the place is lousy with angels.

Green-Wood is also very hilly, far more hilly than you would expect given how flat most of Brooklyn is. 

It's so elevated in places you can see across the Brooklyn rooftops all the way to the Statue of Liberty. That was a cool discovery.

John & Yoko & Paul & Francine

So I got the just-published John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie and read the whole thing in the past 24 hours.

I like it, although since I've been reading about the Beatles since I was a teen-ager, there's not a lot I haven't read before and this book is no exception. I've already mentioned the bit about Lennon & McCartney dropping acid and staring into each other's eyes, that was a new. 

And I hadn't heard about the island scheme:

In the summer of 1967, Lennon initiated... a trip to Greece to explore the possibility of buying an island where they all could live...

They found an island but:

The truth is that it was a fantasy of John's which Paul merely entertained. Marianne Faithfull, recalling John's enthusiasm for the Greek project, gave an explanation for its failure that is both funny and perceptive: "the last thing Paul wanted to do was live on some fucking island."

The book does use Francine Schwartz's memoir Body Count, about her brief time as Paul's girlfriend, as a source. I had promised to write about the book three and a half years ago. I'm finally doing it.

An interesting aspect of the Ian Leslie book is that he constantly emphasizes how jealous and insecure both John and Paul were of each other's work - John was apparently obsessed with the success of Paul's "Yesterday." And each also resented when the other prioritized someone else over himself.

Based on the book, I'd say that John was even more inclined to insecurity and jealousy and resentment than Paul, but I had had the impression, after reading Francine's book, that Paul was the most insecure and jealous and resentful, especially after reading about the letter incident. One of the most interesting aspects of Francine Schwartz's relationship with Paul was how much time she spent with John and Yoko. She really liked Yoko:

One consolation: Yoko Ono Lennon. She and John moved in with us while their story was still something to hide. As the two of us cooked breakfast for our respective men, she'd rap with a kind of new, feminine wisdom about how hard it was to make them happy. She was fighting her own battle staying sane amidst racist attacks from the Apple cock-and-cunt garden. She was also opening up her wealth of strength and determination to John. All the same, she confided in me that she didn’t believe any relationship could last more than seven years.

John, Yoko and I would watch the “telly” through the evenings when Paul was out raving and drinking and getting it up for God knows who. The three of us felt young and weird and relaxed, and talked about how we could save the company (Apple Corps) if only it could change direction, motivation. | was amazed that John never said a bad word about Paul’s management capabilities. Especially when Paul put thumbs down on Two Virgins.

Yoko made opium cookies one night, and the three of us sat staring at each other, waiting for something to happen. It never did, but that was one time when John read through my giggle to the sadness of waiting up for Paul.

“What are you worried about? Someone had to get the scissors, and it was Her,” he remarked.

If there had been something John and Yoko could do to help me get Paul’s head straightened out, they surely would have done it. I asked John why Paul didn’t do a solo album. It would've seemed the logical outlet for all the ego crap he was laying down at the studio. John half laughed and said, “We thought of it a long time ago. It was going to be called Paul McCartney Goes Too Far. But he wouldn't do it. He’s too hung up about us bein’ Beatles, y know.” 

John obviously loved Paul enough to let him run wild if it would help ease the tension Paul was creating in the studio and at home. Yoko could see it, too.

But Paul was treating them like shit too. He even sent them a hate letter once, unsigned, typed. I brought it in with the morning mail. Paul put most of the fan mail in a big basket, and let it sit for weeks, but John and Yoko opened every piece. When they got to the anonymous note, they sat puzzled, looking at each other with genuine pain in their eyes. “You and your jap tart think you're hot shit,” it said. John put it on the mantle, and in the afternoon, Paul bopped in, prancing much the same self-conscious way he did when we met.

“I just did that for a lark .. .” he said, in his most sugar-coated accent.

it was embarrassing. The three of us swiveled around, staring at him. You could see the pain in John, Yoko simply rose above it, feeling only empathy for John.

I have no idea what "Someone had to get the scissors" means.

There are lots of Beatles outtakes online now, even videos and I found one that show's Francine hanging out with Paul while he works on "Mother Nature's Son" and "Blackbird." Francine shows up at minute 3:17.

MURDERBOT TRAILER!

This Murderbot production on AppleTV+ is so of the zeitgeist. The part where Murderbot says "and humans are idiots" is exactly what so many people felt seeing the majority of American voters deliberately choose stupidity and evil in November 2024.

And "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon" looks amazing!

But my favorite part is Ratthi saying: "I mean, that's what it calls itself so I am just being respectful." Yes I LOLd.

  

  

Stills from Murderbot in Vanity Fair

It looks great! 

Coming May 16!

The casting of the character Ratthi - shown here about to hug the anti-hug Murderbot - is perfect.

I think they removed the character Overse though, which makes me sad.

Carmina Burana - WTF?

Well I have just found the most goofy version ever of Carmina Burana. 

It's a 1975 video of a production by French director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.

It's like a cross between a painting by Hieronymus Bosch and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Probably my favorite moment is their rendition of "Were diu werlt alle min" - in English "Were all the world mine" a song that expresses an obsession with the Queen of England, supposedly Eleanor of Aquitaine.

It goes, in Middle High German:

Were diu werlt alle min

von dem mere unze an den Rin,

des wolt ih mih darben,

daz diu chünegin von Engellant

lege an minen armen.

Translation:

Were all the world mine

from the sea to the Rhine,

I would give it all up

to have the queen of England

lie in my arms.

In the production the "queen of England" is apparently in one of those carnival dunking booths. The best part, she has a sign that says "chünegin von Engellant" (queen of England) on it. I like it when she twirls her braids.

  

Hell yeah I pre-ordered John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

Look, I love George and Ringo too, even though George could be such a buzzkill.

But for me the most important aspect of the Beatles has always been the Lennon-McCartney partnership.

From the Guardian:

It’s a drag, isn’t it,” Paul McCartney told reporters quizzing him the day after John Lennon’s murder, a soundbite as dispiritingly muted, even callous, as his reaction to his mother’s death when he was 14: “How are we going to get by without her money?” Behind the scenes, Paul was lost and tearful, as well as guilt‑stricken that he and John hadn’t properly reconciled since the Beatles split: “I’m never going to fall out with anybody again.” Still, the enshrinement of John and vilification of Paul had begun. “John Lennon was three-quarters of the Beatles,” Philip Norman told television viewers while promoting his biography, Shout!, a few months later.

The antagonism has abated in recent years, but the John-Paul duality persists. Heavy rocker versus cute populist. Working-class rebel v smug bourgeois clone. Tormented genius v girly sentimentalist. Strawberry Fields Forever v Penny Lane.

Ian Leslie takes on these tired polarities by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: “passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy”. However much at odds temperamentally, John and Paul were an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Beatles, with George and Ringo (not much featured here) as add-ons. The emotional ties they shared, not least the early loss of their mothers, weren’t ones they could talk about, so they sang them instead. As Paul put it: “You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people.”

Although I believe the enshrinement of John as a tormented genius and vilification of Paul as girly sentimentalist predated Lennon's murder by at least ten years.

If these newspaper reviews are any indication, the book has lots of stuff I never knew about before.

New York Times review:

I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains. There is a passage about them being high on LSD, after recording the song “Getting Better” during the “Sgt. Pepper’s” sessions, that seems to me central to Leslie’s understanding of his subjects:

That night, John and Paul did something that the two of them practiced quite a few times during this period: They gazed intensely into each other’s eyes. They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other, almost obliterating any sense of themselves as distinct individuals. “There’s something disturbing about it,” recalled McCartney, much later, in his understated way. “You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t.”

Los Angeles Times review:

“ ‘Yesterday’ feels like a shift in the balance of power,” says Leslie. “From the beginning they were equals, and ‘Yesterday’ wasn’t only just a hit, but the song that more artists covered than any other Beatles song. Paul even sang it onstage by himself when they performed. And it triggered John’s insecurities.” 

 

A further separation occurred in 1967 when Lennon, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, moved out of London into the suburbs while McCartney stayed behind, soaking in the beau monde of the city’s arts scene. Leslie also writes of Lennon’s use of LSD and McCartney’s reluctance to follow suit. “They weren’t living near each other anymore and songwriting became more like a job with set hours,” says Leslie. But “even as they were starting to drift apart, the songs were still astonishing.” 

 

One-upmanship between the partners became a spur for Lennon to try harder, with McCartney responding in kind. When Lennon presented McCartney with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a woozy reverie loosely based on his childhood, McCartney wrote his own memory piece, “Penny Lane.” Lennon wrote “Imagine” a year after the Beatles broke up and thought he may have finally topped McCartney. “When he played it for people to get feedback, the question he asked was, ‘Is it better than ‘Yesterday?,’ ” says Leslie.

I always thought it was the Sgt. Peppers album that changed the balance of power, with McCartney pushing the band to get it done. Meanwhile Lennon, according to the interview by Maureen Cleave (which contains the infamous "bigger than Jesus" quote):

He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. "Physically lazy," he said. "I don't mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more."

And Ringo attests to the Paul-driven dynamic in this video clip.

One of my ambitions is to find THE most perfect photo of John and Paul together, preferably playing music. This one is my favorite so far, although it would be better if you could see all of their faces.

Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon

I've mentioned musician Jackson Browne a few times over the course of this blog - this blog which will be twenty-freaking years old in November! It seems like just yesterday it was a mere ten years old.

I knew that Jackson Browne was an important career and personal support for Warren Zevon - I wrote about that back in 2014.

But I only just found out about this Dutch radio recording of Browne and Zevon playing and singing together, available on the Internet Archive for free. It's known as "The Offender Meets The Pretender."

I've recently gotten into Warren Zevon. I've enjoyed his songs over the years, and went to bat against a college radio station in Philadelphia, back in the 1990s because they were bowdlerizing "Lawyers Guns and Money," cutting out the line "the shit has hit the fan" when they played it. Because of the word "shit." 

But I've discovered additional Zevon cuts lately, like Desperados under the Eaves, which has Zevon's musical impression of an air conditioner that is amazingly soulful and affecting.

I've rediscovered "Tenderness on the Block" released in 1978 - it's not on "Offender/Pretender" - but it is on YouTube -  it's hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote cynical and gory songs like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, Werewolves of London and Excitable Boy (discussed in this droll Paste article "Profoundly Horrifying Song Lyrics: “Excitable Boy” by Warren Zevon.") When I hear these lines from Tenderness:

Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight?
Trying to run before she can walk, that's right
She's growing up, she has a young man waiting...

I almost expect the next line to be - 

And he's gonna dig up her grave and build a cage with her bones

But this girl won't get caught by the Excitable Boy because:

She was wide-eyed, now she's street-wise

To the lies and the jive talk

But she'll find true love

And tenderness on the block

UPDATE: he co-wrote this with Jackson Browne so that makes more sense.

What's truly horrifying to me is that any teenager Zevon might have been singing about in 1978 is in her sixties now. 

Zevon didn't make it to his sixties, dying at age 56 - not from liquor or drugs (although he abused those for much of his life) or a car crash, but from mesothelioma.

Enjoy.

Orchid update ~ eight flowers

Although it's hard to see there are eight. But there are, trust me.

CLOSEUP!

LE CHAT NOIR ~ en francais

Well I finally have a French translation of my play LE CHAT NOIR that I like and I got a bunch of francophone actors to perform it on Zoom this past week. What an experience. It was so weird but fun to hear the whole thing in French. 

And it was so appropriate since, as I just found out, this week is la semaine de la langue français et de la francophonie. That is to say, the French government is, from March 15 - 23, celebrating the French language and French-speakers, which includes those outside of France.

By chance, the French speakers I assembled for the Zoom reading included a Ukrainian, a Franco-Turk, two French people from the south of France, a Quebecois and me, because I decided to play the role of Madeline Valadon, the mother of Suzanne Valadon. Only because she does not have a lot of lines and I practiced her lines night and day for a month. 

And I still couldn't quite get some words right. I practiced with Microsoft Word, which has a dictation feature - you speak and Word transcribes what you say onto a document. And you can do it in lots of different languages, including French.

So I practiced saying the words with Microsoft Word and watched how it was transcribed. I got pretty good after a while but there were some words that were incredibly difficult to pass off to Word as if a French-speaker was talking. Words like "scélérat" (scoundrel), "pour louer" - which means "to rent for" but Word kept thinking I was saying "polluer" which means "to pollute." And "meule" which means "millstone" and it's sort of pronounced "mew-lah" but Word though I was saying, at various times, "mur" (wall), "mûle" (mule), "molle" (soft) and "nul" (zero, but also an insult along the lines of "loser.")

I did finally conquer "la fée vert" which means "the green fairy" - it's what people sometimes call absinthe, but I had to practice a million times before Word understood I was saying "fee" for fairy, instead of feuille (leaf) or fait (fact) or veille (the day before) Oh lah lah!

But worst of all is "love" - or "l'amour." Usually when I said the word it came out "la mort" which means death. And they are fairly distinct- "la mort" is like lah mehr, while l'amour is like lah-moor. I don't know why it took so long to get it right. And I have to get it right! French is the language of l'amour, not the language of la mort!

 

Michael row the boat ashore

There has always been something about the folk song "Michael row the boat ashore" that really gets to me. 

And that was before I knew it was originally a slave song that was "discovered" by white people during the Civil War and then published. Apparently it was pretty obscure for almost a hundred years until a friend of Pete Seeger rediscovered it. 

The version that really gets me is by Joe and Eddie  maybe because it was used during an important moment in the show "The Good Lord Bird." 

The first version I heard, by the Highwaymen also affects me, but the Joe and Eddie version makes me cry. And that was before I read that Joe Gilbert of Joe and Eddie died at the age of 23 in a car crash. 

On his now-defunct website, Eddie Brown writes:

After Joe’s tragic death, I worked as a single in L.A. and for a short while, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although I enjoyed performing, I found it frustrating to keep a band together and it was during this time I started writing, something I had never done before. Eventually I moved back to L.A., where I began to spend a lot of time in the studio, fortunately, with some of the greatest producers in popular music: Gene McDaniels, Louis Shelton, Richard Perry, Thom Bell, and Quincy Jones. I will be forever indebted to these wonderful, talented people. Because of them I found my next calling, writing and producing music.

I put the song in one of my plays, which will hopefully be produced one of these days.

Sprinter is here again

It's been three years since I celebrated Sprinter so it's about time.

I don't have any outdoor pictures handy but I do have an indoor image of a Sprinter afternoon shadow.

MURDERBOT'S A-COMING!

GO MURDERBOT GO!

Murderbot premieres May 16 with its first two episodes on Apple TV+. It will run 10 episodes total, with a weekly drop after the premiere through July 11. 

MORE ABOUT MURDERBOT

Orchid report: Six flowers

So we lost one flower from the first stem, but now the second stem has two flowers so now it's a net total of six flowers.

The latest orchid report: five flowers plus more...

OK! So now there are five flowers on the one stem, plus another stem where at least three more buds are about to open and I think the old stem from last year, which is still green, is planning to bud too - that would be cool.

Four flowers ~ orchidtacular

Orchid's progress ~ three flowers and a fourth on the way

Orchid's progress ~ two flowers

There are actually three stems now shooting out of this plant. The one with the two flowers, the one from last year which is still green, but doesn't look like it has any plans to sprout, and a brand new stem which looks like it will have flowers in about a month. Big excitement here at orchid central.

The other stem-like items are aerial roots. Apparently it's perfectly normal for orchids to have them.

My orchid is back!

And ahead of schedule. Last year (technically still this year) my orchid didn't bloom until mid-January. But this year - voila!

Looks like I'll have to get a bigger pot soon.

Christmas time is here

Which means it's time for the music of Vince Guaraldi thanks to his work for "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

Interesting facts about Guaraldi:

• He was a life-long resident of the San Francisco area.
• According to this bio: " In 1971 he became an unofficial member of the Grateful Dead, jamming with them in Bay Area concerts while the group was between permanent keyboardists.
• He is on the back cover of the Grateful Dead's album Aoxomoxoa which was released in 1969.
• However, I can't find any recordings of Guaraldi with the band, which is so frustrating because there are so many recordings of Grateful Dead concerts in 1969 - 1971.
• (I blogged about Janis Joplin sitting in with the Dead back in 2011.)
• He died of a heart attack at age 47 during a gig.

Here is a short documentary about Guaraldi.

The sorry state of rail travel in the United States

To get an idea of how much worse rail travel is between the United States and Europe, consider this: 

There are 334 miles between Montreal and New York City, going almost directly south.

There are 331 miles between Edinburgh and London, going almost directly south.

A mere three miles difference.

But it takes 12 hours to get from Montreal to New York. Amtrak claims 10 hours, but in my experience it takes 12.

It takes 3 and a quarter hours to get from Edinburgh to London.

Even considering that passports must be inspected when crossing the international border between Canada and the United States, that's a ridiculous difference in the amount of time it takes to travel virtually the exact same distance.

It takes over 24 hours to travel from New York to Miami, a distance of 1100 miles. 

It takes 16 hours to travel the same approximately distance between Paris France and Maribor Slovenia, which includes four countries - France, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.

Something needs to be done about train travel in the US.

Yacht Rock featuring Steely Dan ~ how have I never seen this before

I only found out about this Yacht Rock web series via the book Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan which I just got. 

This episode about Steely Dan is hysterical.

Murderbot is WIRED

It's true that there is a Murderbot TV series in the works, but as far as I'm concerned, Martha Wells has only now really hit the big time with this profile in the tech-focused magazine WIRED.

Although one paragraph discusses how famous Wells has not been:

To this day, most people—even in College Station—still don’t know who Martha Wells is. Local newspapers ignore press releases about her latest award. The Barnes and Noble down the street has never invited her to its Star Wars Day, even though she has written a Star Wars novel. She did a signing in town once where nobody showed up.

Wow, that's rough.

This WIRED piece on Wells is the first time I've seen her husband mentioned, so extra points for that. Both Wells and the author of the WIRED article "Murderbot, She Wrote," Meghan Herbst are on Bluesky now and I am following them both. Herbst quickly followed me back, I'm still waiting on Wells.

It is probably pretty obvious through the Murderbot Diaries, but Wells has very cool political views. I've mentioned before that Murderbot is "gloriously woke."

I've written a one-act play and an R-rated fan fiction about Murderbot. I hope one day Wells licenses Murderbot to writers the way the Star Wars franchise has permitted writers, like Wells herself, to write Star Wars books.

Fascism comes to America

I knew the United States was in bad shape when it elected Donald Trump in 2016. 

I began learning French in earnest not long after that election. And now I speak French OK after eight years.

It turns out it's very difficult to emigrate to Canada, even if you're pretty good at French. But I am looking at all possible options for getting out of the United States for the duration of the hideous evil Trump dictatorship.

Hell yeah I voted early for Kamala

Meanwhile Trump is being even more loathsome than ever. I didn't think it was possible for the Orange Freak to be even more grotesque.

This cartoon sums up the Trump campaign, and the stupid cult's worship of a truly evil, rapidly declining old man.

The Roosevelt Island Turkey

Just walking down the street. 

She's been named "Rosie" - I guess for Roosevelt Island? 

Sometimes she hangs out on the lawn next to my apartment building. I've heard her gobbling, early in the morning.

Another silly French animation by moi

Because pourquoi the hell pas? Inspired, sort of, by Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.

The translation:

Here they grow the flowers of evil.
I don't like them in general.
But if you follow this fine lesson
By giving more hydration
we will have the flowers of good.

Happy Autumn 2024 ~ Sunday, September 22, 2024 at 8:43 AM

"Atlas Shrugged" quiz for Ayn Rand fans

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog about Ayn Rand and her endless monstrosity, "Atlas Shrugged" but I got into arguments with Rand fans on Facebook recently and put together a quiz for them  - Randroids almost never remember much about AS, if they ever really read it in the first place. 

The quiz gives you a sense of just how illogical Rand was and how much she hated those who did not agree with her "philosophy."

1. When a man inspired by John Galt's endless speech hears a mother tell her child to give away one of his toys, what does he do?

Answer

He slaps her so hard he fractures her jaw.

2. When an old guy in the 20th Century Motor Company's company town finds out that the money he wanted for record albums was given to an 8-year-old girl so she could have braces, what does he do?

Answer

He punches her in the mouth so hard he knocks out all her teeth - it's clear in context that Rand considers this justified - one clue is that the child is described as ugly - almost all villains in Rand's simple-minded tales are ugly.

3. What is Rand's explanation for the existence of Communism?

Answer

Sadism. "And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way (Ivy Starnes) eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’"

4. Who forced the 20th Century Motor Company to collectivize?

Answer

The owners of the 20th Century Motor Company themselves. Because you know, that always happens.

5. When trains from California reach New York City, and they have to dump tons of rotten produce they've been carrying, which river do they dump it in?

Answer

In the East River, which is on the other side of Manhattan from where the train line stops - at the Hudson River. This error is made worse by the fact that Rand was living in Manhattan when she wrote this.

6. How do the book's heroes Dagny and Hank convince local officials to allow their train to barrel through towns at dangerously high speeds?

Answer

Local officials were "outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour."

7. How does Rand deal with people on a train who hold pro-government opinions - including the children of those people?

Answer

She gases them, then blows them up.

8. When all industries in the United States are suffering from railroad failure-induced shortages, and cities are starving, what is the one industry that, inexplicably, manages to function perfectly?

Answer

The florist industry: "It was late afternoon when the florist telephoned her. "Our Chicago office sent word that they were unable to deliver the flowers, Mrs. Rearden, because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet." This is how Rand decides to have Mrs. Rearden find out her husband Hank is having an affair with Dagny Taggart.

Killing Sean Bean is tight

Super easy - barely an inconvenience.

I just found my new favorite thing.

Mes animations françaises

Well the quest to learn French continues - I've been at it seriously since Trump became president, since I rightly guessed he would be a disaster for the United States and there would come a time when I would have to escape to Canada, which is officially bi-lingual.

I still am only about level B2, just maybe on the edge of C1, which is "expert" level. I'm pretty confident in my ability to read and even to write in French. My French speaking ability is OK except when confronted with an actual francophone, and then I become embarrassed about speaking it. 

And as far as understanding when French people talk - I can understand French politicians and other professional speakers pretty well, but regular street French still sounds like a big mush.

But the quest continues and I've taken to creating silly videos as a learning aid.

The first one I created "Les Perroquets" was because I kept mixing up the word "perroquet" - parrot - and "perruque" - wig. And then the goofy story about wig-wearing animals came to me. Voilà.

This next one, "La Pecheuse" I made because I find it funny that "pêche" means to go fishing, as in "J'aime aller à la pêche" - "I like to go fishing," but the word pêche also means "peach." Yes I realize English has weird homonyms too, like "bat" the mammal and "bat" as in baseball bat, but I'm used to those. The French ones still seem funny to me.

Then I switched to writing "comptines" which are French nursery rhymes. The first one, "Pain Perdu" was written in a Covid haze - yes Covid finally got me at last, this past July. So I was thinking about the French term for French Toast, which is not, as some have guessed "le toast francais." 

The French call it "pain perdu" which is pain = bread and perdu = lost. Lost bread. So I came up with three verses on the subject of "pain perdu." 

It's trickier to rhyme in French than you might think, because although a LOT of French words rhyme with each other - in practice, French almost always throws out the last consonant of any given word, which means most of the words end with a vowel sound. 

 On the other hand, the word you want to use may change depending on whether the subject is male or female, for example. 

The main character in these three Pain Perdu verses is a French woman, but in the second verse I wrote "Une jour il va me rendre fou." which means "one day it's going to drive me crazy" (literally "one day he is going to me render crazy.") 

Not only did I get the gender of the word "jour" - day - wrong - it should be UN jour (but the similar word "journee" IS feminine - don't get me started) but since the person speaking is female, it should be "il va me rendre folle" A crazy man is fou. A crazy woman is folle.  But "folle" rhymes with "goal," which does not rhyme with perdu. Oy.

Since my voice was a croaking mess at the time I was making the animation (I was referred to as "sir" by the receptionist when I called to cancel my dentist appointment) I decided to use AI for the voice. And since I hate my voice even when it is not impacted by Covid, I like the results much better. 

Pain Perdue is the first to not feature le chat qui porte une perruque, but the second one to feature outer space. 

The cat in the wig is back in the most recent video, "Les Nouvelles Comptines Pour Les Nuls" (New Nursery Rhymes for Dummies.) The first rhyme is about a tea kettle, only because the word for tea kettle, "bouilloire" is hard for me to say. Like many French words it has too many vowels in a row. Although at least it has consonants. There are two French words I can think of off the top of my head - oie (goose) pronounced "wa" and eau (water) pronounced "oh" that have NO CONSONANTS. 

 And I also confuse bouilloire with two other words -  "brouillard" - fog and "brouiller" - blur.

The second rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for kite is "flying deer" - cerf volant.

The third rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for "bat" in the mammal sense is "chauve-souris" which literally means "bald mouse." I mean, really? You see a flying mammal and the thing you notice is the condition of its head hair? And I don't think non-flying mice exactly have long flowing locks either.

Also the word for "to smile" in French is "sourir" - which, when you conjugate it for first or second person singular (well present tense, they have a dozen other tenses, don't get me started), is spelt "souris" exactly like the word for mouse. "Une souris qui sourit" means "A mouse who smiles" but even though the word "sourit" in this case is conjugated for third person singular, it sounds the same - so it sounds like "Oon sue-ree key sue-ree." And yes, I spelled it wrong (souri) in my animation. And yes that is a stylized representation of the Moulin Rouge.

Don't even get me started about the confusion between voler meaning to steal and voler meaning to fly. I'm thinking of making another animation about that.

La souris qui sourit et la vache qui rit - ca va me rendre folle.

I created all the music using Garage Band, and hand drew the illustrations in the first two videos, mostly, but used canned images for the second two. And the AI voices were created in murf.ai. I put it altogether in Adobe Premiere Pro, which I am finally getting the hang of - I was pretty happy with the bat.